The jam-packed public hearing late last month objecting to a plan to slowly close out the practice of farming in most of Scott County in the decades to come is getting results.
Since then, the county's senior managers have agreed to begin talks with advocates of small-scale, locally grown food to see whether that new form of farming can coexist with a rapidly suburbanizing county.
"I truly believe there will be farmland here 150 years from now," county Administrator Dave Unmacht said Tuesday. "The question is what will it look like. We need to sit down and work it out."
The clock is ticking for counties and cities to submit new long-range plans to the Metropolitan Council by the end of this year. That timeline, Unmacht said, creates "urgency but no panic" around finding solutions.
The last major public hearing on the plan, on March 27, drew about 100 people, of whom 20 spoke out. Many addressed the future of farming, saying that priorities in society are shifting toward a desire for superfresh, locally grown products rather than ones that need to be trucked in from states like California.
In the wake of that hearing, County Board members are considering taking part in a tour to see what sort of smaller-scale, cutting-edge farming is taking place around the county.
"Do I understand all the farming taking place in this county?" Commissioner Jon Ulrich, of Savage, asked his colleagues during Tuesday's board meeting. "No."
The county's planning manager, Brad Davis, said in an interview that officials are in the early stages of creating a farm advisory group.